Government Operations committee  I know it sounds ridiculous, but seriously, somebody has to have the authority to whip out a chequebook and cut cheques manually. Clearly, the system isn't working. If I'm a manager and I have employee A, and I know employee A isn't being paid, and I know approximately what emplo

Government Operations committee  I think we're all hoping that the government stands up a committee of sorts so that there is an opportunity for us to work together to both identify and resolve the problems. So far, other than a few meetings between the PSAC and Marie Lemay, we're really not doing that.

Government Operations committee  There are mechanisms for giving emergency pay. There's both emergency pay and priority pay, both of which should produce a paycheque within 48 hours. Your guess is as good as mine as to why exactly that system doesn't work, but what we saw was people jumping through all the fiery

Government Operations committee  —so they didn't find themselves any better off. In some cases we also heard that departments such as Health Canada had widespread issues. We heard cases in which the bureaucracy was telling us they just didn't have the resources to process emergency and priority pays anymore; t

Government Operations committee  They really needed a way to triage the new issues as they arose and to be able to get pay into people's pockets faster. We asked for that notice to go out. Marie respected that and sent it out because we, the unions, asked for it. But again, the notices that go out to employees

Government Operations committee  How could it not have an impact on employees' morale? Really, I mentioned at the outset of my testimony that we're also in the middle of a difficult round of collective bargaining, but we were ready to sit with this government and work our way through it. But now you have this la

Government Operations committee  I'm not opposed to the choice to use an off-the-shelf product. I'm definitely opposed to the lack of time and planning and appropriate consideration that went into whether or not it was actually a value-for-money exercise, whether or not it was actually going to fix the problems

Government Operations committee  At that point we had over 150 critical cases and over 300 total cases.

Government Operations committee  Yes, the April meeting that Ms. Lemay referred to was a meeting between the president of the PSAC and me and the national executive vice-president of PSAC. We were there representing all of the unions with these issues. We presented issues, they presented solutions, but those sol

Government Operations committee  I don't think it's fast enough, by the way, and we don't see those timelines being respected.

Government Operations committee  But for sure, priority one is people who aren't being paid. Let me give you an example of somebody who might fall into priority three but is critical: a nurse working part-time in the north, where they have troubles recruiting and retaining. They have a part-time nurse whom they

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  We have put all of our critical cases forward, yes.

Government Operations committee  I have written to Minister Foote on a number of occasions now, not just about pay, but at least two times specifically related to pay, and that has produced meetings with other officials, including Minister Brison, the President of the Treasury Board. But I've yet to have an oppo

Government Operations committee  I don't know if you heard me. I very impolitely snickered out loud when they said that, because I couldn't understand how.... There we were saying that we know today of x number of problems that exist as a result of wave one. Can we get a commitment from you to at least correct t